Joe Hill - Horns

Lee’s lips parted slightly. He seemed to want to say more but not know how to proceed. Finally he said, “Glenna’s cousin Gary is having a bonfire in a couple weeks. At his place. Sort of an end-of-the-summer party. He’s got some bottle rockets and stuff. He says he might have beer, too. You think you’d want to come?”

“When?”

“It’s the last Saturday this month.”

“I can’t. My dad is playing a show with John Williams at the Boston Pops. It’s opening night. We always go to his opening-night shows.”

“Yeah, I understand that,” Lee said.

Lee put the cross in his mouth and sucked on it, thinking. Then he dropped it and finally said the thing he wanted to say. “Would you ever sell it?”

“Sell what?”

“Eve’s Cherry. The bomb. There’s a junker at Gary’s. Gary says no one will care if we trash the thing. We might put lighter fluid on it and blow it up.” He caught himself, then added, “That’s not why I asked if you could come. I asked because it’ll be more fun if you’re there.”

“No. I know,” Ig said. “Just, I wouldn’t feel right selling it to you.”

“Well. You can’t keep giving me things either. If you were going to sell it, how much would you want? I’ve got a little money saved up from tips on the magazine sales.”

Or you could borrow a twenty from your mama, Ig thought, in an almost sly, silky voice that he hardly recognized as his own.

“I don’t want your money,” Ig said. “But I’ll trade you.”

“For what?”

“For that,” Ig said, and nodded at the cross.

There. It was said. Ig’s next breath held in his lungs, a hot, chlorine-flavored capsule of oxygen, chemical and strange. Lee had saved his life, pulled him out of the river when he was unconscious and pounded the air back into him, and Ig was ready to give back, felt he owed Lee anything and everything-except for this. She had signaled him, not Lee. Ig understood there was no right in bargaining with Lee like this, no moral defense, no way to sell it to himself as the act of a decent person. No sooner had he asked for the cross back than he felt a kind of shriveling inside; he had always thought of himself as the good guy in his own story, the clear hero. But the good guy wouldn’t do this. Maybe some things were more important than being the good guy, though.

Lee stared, a slight half smile pulling at the corners of his lips. Ig felt a blaze of heat in his face and was not entirely sorry, was glad to be embarrassed for her. He said, “I know this is coming out of nowhere, but I think I have a crush on her. I would’ve said something earlier, but I didn’t want to be in your way.”

Without hesitation Lee reached behind his neck and undid the clasp. “All you ever had to do was ask. It’s yours. It was always yours. You found it, not me. All I did was fix it. And if it gets you in with her, I’m glad to fix that, too.”

“I thought she was your sort of thing, though. You aren’t-”

Lee waved a hand through the air. “Going to compete with a friend over some girl whose name I don’t know. All the stuff you’ve given me, all the CDs? Even if they mostly sucked, I appreciate it. I’m not an ungrateful person, Ig. You ever see her again, you’re all over it. I’m behind you all the way. I don’t think she’s coming back, though.”

“She is,” Ig said softly.

Lee looked at him.

The truth had come out before Ig could help himself. He had to know that Lee didn’t care, because they were friends now. Were going to be friends for the rest of their lives.

When Lee didn’t speak-just floated there with that half smile on his long, narrow face-Ig went on, “I met someone who knows her. She wasn’t there last Sunday because her family is moving up from Rhode Island and they had to go back and get the rest of their stuff.”

Lee finished removing the cross and tossed it lightly to Ig, who caught it when it hit the water.

“Go get her, tiger,” Lee said. “You’re the one who found that thing, and for whatever reason she didn’t seem to take a shine to me. Besides. I have all I can handle in the lady department these days. Glenna came over to see me yesterday, to tell me about the car at Gary’s, and while she was over, she took the whole thing in her mouth. Only for a minute. But she did it.” Lee beamed-the smile of a child with a new balloon. “What a fucking slut, huh?”

“That’s awesome,” Ig said, and smiled weakly.

IG SAW MERRIN WILLIAMS and then pretended he hadn’t: no easy task, his heart leaping inside him, throwing itself into his rib cage like an angry drunk assaulting the bars of his holding cell. He had thought of this moment not just every day but nearly every hour of every day, since he had last seen her, and it was almost too much for his nervous system, was overloading the grid. She wore cream-colored linen slacks and a white blouse with the sleeves folded back, and her hair was loose this time, and she looked right at him as he came up the aisle with his family, but he pretended not to see her.

Lee and his father came in a few minutes before the service began and settled into a pew on Ig’s side, close to the front. Lee turned his head and gave her a long look, up and down. She didn’t seem to notice, was gazing intently at Ig. After Lee had finished inspecting her, he peered back over his shoulder, to look at Ig himself from under heavy-lidded eyes. He shook his head in mock disapproval before pivoting away.

Merrin stared at Iggy for the entire first five minutes of the service, and in all that time he did not once look at her directly. He clenched his hands together, his palms slick with sweat, and kept his eyes fixed on Father Mould.

She didn’t give up staring at him until Father Mould said, “Let us pray.” She slid off the pew to kneel and put her hands together, and that was when Ig slipped the cross out of his pocket. He held it in the cup of his hand, found some sunshine, and pointed it at her. A spectral golden cross of light drifted over her cheekbone and struck the corner of her eye. She blinked the first time he flashed her with it, flinched the second time, and looked back at him the third time. He held the piece steady, so a golden cross of pure light burned in the center of his hand and its reflection shone on her cheek. She regarded him with unexpected solemnity, the radio operator in a war movie, receiving a life-or-death signal from a comrade-in-arms.

Slowly and deliberately, he tilted it this way and that, flashing the Morse-code message he had memorized over the course of the last week. It felt important to get it exactly right, and he handled the cross as if it were a thimbleful of nitroglycerin. When the message was complete, he held her gaze for a moment longer and then closed his hand around the cross and looked away again, his heart slamming so loudly he felt sure his father must be able to hear it, kneeling next to him. But his father was praying over his hands, his eyes closed.

Ig Perrish and Merrin Williams took care not to look at each other again throughout the rest of the service. Or, to be more exact, they did not look into each other’s face, although he was conscious of her watching him from the corner of her eye, as he watched her, enjoying the way she stood to sing, with her shoulders back. Her hair burned in the daylight.

Father Mould blessed them all and bade them to love one another, which was precisely Ig’s goal. As people began to file out, Ig remained where he was, his father’s hand on his shoulder, as always. Merrin Williams stepped into the aisle, her own father behind her, and Ig expected her to stop and thank him for rescuing her cross, but she did not even look at him. Instead she stared back and up at her father, chatting with him as they went out. Ig opened his mouth to speak to her-and then his gaze was drawn to her left hand, her index finger extended to point behind her, back toward her pew. It was such a casual gesture she could’ve just been swinging her arm, but Ig was sure she was telling him where to wait for her.